Test driven architecture enabled process for open collaboration in global

Abstract

A method for developing a software project includes identifying business cases and goals for the software project, defining a common interface architecture through which components of the software project are to be integrated, identifying software project components to be integrated over the common interface, defining high level requirements of the project components, elaborating the component interfaces and defining detailed component requirements, implementing the project components, testing the project components individually, defining integration tests for testing integrated components, and executing the integration tests on a set of integrated components.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED UNITED STATES APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims priority from “A Test Driven Architecture Enabled Process for Open Collaboration in Global Software Development Environments”, U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 868,109 of Avritzer, et al., filed Dec. 1, 2006, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference.TECHNICAL FIELD[0002]This disclosure is directed to a process to enable collaboration of global software development teams by defining a common architecture for collaboration and testing process to drive the pace of software development.DISCUSSION OF THE RELATED ART[0003]The overhead for managing global software development teams, for developing work packages and defining the detailed requirements for each work package severely constrains the scalability, productivity and quality of work performed in global software development environments. The development of detailed requirements typically consumes most of project resources. In addit...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012]Exemplary embodiments of the invention as described herein generally include methods and systems for a test driven architecture enabled approach for open collaboration in global software development environments. An approach according to an embodiment of the invention uses a common architecture bus to enable open collaboration, a test driven approach to determine the pace of product development, and a quantitative method to rate the performance of software development teams in a distributed global development environment. In addition, a methodology is provided for the efficient management of remote teams that transfers most of the overhead of work allocation and quality assurance from the central team to the remote teams. A central enabler is used to identify domain experts and a quantitative approach for rating the performance of software development teams in a global distributed environment. Work packages are assigned to teams based on domain expertise. Team performance is linked to the quality of the work performed and to the team productivity. In addition, the approach increases team productivity by placing the teams in a collaborative and competitive environment. The focus is both upstream on architecture and downstream on testing.

[0013]A common architecture bus enables global distributed team collaboration, and the test teams can drive product development pace by defining test cases and deliverables to be met by the test cases. An approach according to an embodiment of the invention can be generalized by structuring a remote team into a multi-level tree hierarchy. Each intermediate node in the tree would represent a central team to the remote teams managed by it.

[0014]A global software development approach according to an embodiment of the invention can be fully automated.

Problems solved by technology

The overhead for managing global software development teams, for developing work packages and defining the detailed requirements for each work package severely constrains the scalability, productivity and quality of work performed in global software development environments.

The development of detailed requirements typically consumes most of project resources.

In addition, requirements churn has been reported as a major source of project delays.

The current mode of operation of using a central team to perform project management, requirements, architecture, and integration and testing incurs very large overhead for the central team and limits the number of teams that could productively participate.

Specifically, MDRAD focuses on central team definition of requirements, and lacks guidelines and methods for enabling open collaboration, quantitatively rating teams' performance, and for allocating work packages efficiently.

However, neither UP nor RUP address quantitative performance ratings to do team comparisons, and efficient work allocation based on team performance.

When domain experts are from different locations, there's a travel burden for some of them to achieve the all in one room design approach.

However, when distributed teams need to perform tasks within a physical room, team members may resent leaving their home offices for frequent and extended travel to a “foreign work room”.

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